What is History? What are the sources and procedures used by
Historians?
What are the major types (or varieties) of History? Why do we study
History?

Historians who have tried to define history or to discuss the nature
of historical thinking have reached such diverse conclusions that one
practitioner
abandoned the effort, declaring "history is what historians do". No
doubt
true, but this statement offers the student only a little help.
Accordingly,
for our purposes, history will have three separate but always
interrelated
meanings: History is the past (whether or not anyone recalls or
writes about it); History is the active process of studying and
writing about the past; and History is what men and women write
(an essay, an article, or a book) following a systematic study of the
past.
History, in the broadest sense then, results from a multi-faceted
encounter
between the past and the men and women who study it as well as write
about
it and the reader of the results. Or, as the authors of a recent text
write,
"History is an effort to reconstruct the past to
discover
what people thought and did and how their beliefs and
actions
continue to influence human life." [McKay, Hill, and Buckler,
History of World Societies, 3rd ed, 1992, p. 4]

Written histories produced by modern professional (and skilled
amateur)
historians, however different in choice of subject and approach, share
at least four characteristics. They are based on a critical analysis of
evidence, secondary as well as primary. The evidence most commonly used
by historians are written records, but also valuable are other sources,
such as, for example, visual evidence or archeological evidence. In
dealing
with this evidence, historians exhibit an imaginative appreciation of
historical
anachronism (i.e. the recognition that the past is different from the
present).
They attribute causation to secular rather than divine factors. And
they
present the evidence (the facts) according to a significant pattern and
order determined by the judgment of the historian. The collection of
facts
and their interpretation are thus woven together in the study of
history.

If history is the study of all that men and women have done and said
in the past and of how they expressed themselves (in the arts), then
the
possible varieties of written history are endless. Most common are:
political,
institutional, and diplomatic; intellectual and cultural; social and
cultural;
and economic. At times, one of these may receive more emphasis than
another;
today, for example, social history is often more stressed than
political
history. Equally prevalent and probably more popular with the non-
professional
reader are biographies, some of which attempt to understand an
individual
in the context of his/her life and times while others apply (modern)
psychological
theories to explain character and motivation. Historians sympathetic to
the social sciences focus on the factors, largely social and economic,
that bring about social change; like political scientists or
sociologists,
these historians view their studies as scientific, using the past as a
laboratory to derive and test theories dealing with contemporary
problems.

Why study history? Why should we, to be more specific, understand
something
about the history of Classical Greece or Kievan Russ or early Japan or
Europe during the High Middle Ages or the migrations of Slavic peoples?
The simplest answer is that what the people of these early times
thought
and did still influences our modern world. More important, from the
study
of the past, modern people learn something about the shared history of
humanity. Thus, when historians ask questions like: How and why did
cities
emerge? How did different political systems evolve? How did people
create
the sort of economic system needed to sustain a complex civilization?
How
did a society's religious beliefs arise and evolve and influence daily
life? How and why did civilizations like the Greeks produce brilliant
cultures?
Why do empires and civilizations decline? and Why do peoples and
nations
go to war? they are asking perennial questions, questions applicable
not
just to a specific society under study but to all of humanity in any
given
place or at any given time.

The history of historical writing begins with the ancient Greeks and
continues today with the work of thousands of professional and amateur
historians. The existence of such a venerable tradition, one two and a
half millennia long, leads naturally to the question: Why write
history?
While no one response will satisfy everyone, modern historians
generally
agree on some combination of answers drawn from this list.

1. Writing history preserves and celebrates the memory of great men
and noble deeds, as Herodotus claimed in his History of the Persian
Wars;

2. Writing history allows the judgment and punishment (vicarious) of
the guilty, as, for example, in some histories of the Third Reich;

3. Writing history uncovers general truths (or laws) about human
nature
and behavior; both Thucydides (The Peloponnesian War) and
Machiavelli
(The Prince) believed in this conception of history, as
apparently
does Paul Kennedy, author of a recent book on the decline of empires;

4. Writing about history reveals lessons for the future; this idea
prompted
the philosopher George Santayana to exclaim, "Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it."

5. Writing about history helps you learn about yourself and helps in
the creation of a personal and/or cultural identity. Each of us is a
social
creature, and that means we are at least partially the product of every
experience we have had and of all that we have inherited from our
families,
our communities, our nation, and our spiritual, intellectual, and
cultural
heritage. Study of history allows you to situate yourself in time and
place,
and it helps you understand who you are and how you came to be;

6. Writing about history helps you expand your horizons, allowing
you
to understand the values, attitudes, and motives of other people,
whether
of different nationalities or racial groups or religious orientations.
It opens entire worlds, both past and present, before you;

7. Writing about history is a creative act for the historian. In the
act of writing history, the historian encounters the past and, using
his
or her imagination as well as established techniques of investigation,
tries to understand and then recreate it; writing about history (or any
topic) helps you master its subject matter, clarifies your
understanding
of it, and helps you understand your attitude toward it;

8. Writing about history (or any topic) teaches you how to locate,
evaluate,
synthesize, and present in an organized format large amounts of
information;

9. Writing about history allows you to seek the truth (insofar as
that
is humanly possible) about a historical event or personage and add
thereby
to the sum total of human knowledge.

A final question concerns the rationale for studying History. One
eloquent
response comes from the Bradley Commission on History.

Studying history . . . helps [individuals] to develop a
sense
of 'shared humanity'; to understand themselves and 'otherness,' by
learning
how they resemble and how they differ from other people, over time and
space; to question stereotypes of others, and of themselves; to discern
the difference between fact and conjecture; to grasp the complexity of
historical cause; to distrust the simple answer and the dismissive
explanation;
to respect particularity and avoid false analogy; to recognize the
abuse
of historical 'lessons,' and to weigh the possible consequences of such
abuse; to consider that ignorance of the past may make us prisoners of
it; to realize that not all problems have solutions; to be prepared for
the irrational, the accidental, in human affairs; and to grasp the
power
of ideas and character in History.

Why history? . . . The best answer is still that one word:
judgment.
. . . and we need it most in the profession of citizen, which, like it
or not, we are all born into. . . . It takes a sense of the tragic and
of the comic to make a citizen of good judgment. It takes a bone-deep
understanding
of how hard it is to preserve civilization or to better human life, and
of how these have nonetheless been done repeatedly in the past. . . .
Tragedy,
comedy, paradox, and beauty are not the ordinary stuff or even the best
courses in civics or government. But History, along with biography and
literature, if they are well taught cannot help but convey them.